This week, as last week, the story is less the performance of the “next #1″ hopeful than the remarkable family hold of Black Panther. The overall drop of 34% is excellent. But the real story is that Saturdays have become Black Panther Day in the weeks since its opening. Opening weekend, Panther was down on…

Tomb Raider takes the top slot. Will it hold through Saturday, where Black Panther has been extraordinarily muscular? Panther will pass $600 million domestic this weekend, whichever slot it lands in. Tomb Raider is on course for $85 – $100 million domestic and will rely on international to make it a financial hit or failure,…

Back in the 1970s, when the paradigms for shows like this were being set down — by Roger Corman and other ballsy independent producers — this kind of picture would have been a low- budget job, and it probably would have been better for it. If they were going to spend more money on The Purge: Election Year, they might at least have played around more with the idea of an entire nation plunged into chaos.

People who like scary ghost horror movies, from Frankenstein to The Haunting, probably are partial, at least a little, to that awesome, icky sensation of being plunged into sucking swamps of cinematic dread, then rescued (maybe spuriously, maybe not) at the very last possible millisecond—a sensation you may feel quite a few times in The Conjuring 2.

Watching Tomorrowlan—a great big film hunk of love and optimism and confusion from the Walt Disney Studio—you sometimes get the idea that director-writer Brad Bird and company are trying not just to create a new movie but maybe to found a new movement; Dianetics for Disneyphiles, or Pessimists Anonymous or Worldmakers. (Just kidding.)

If you’ve ever seen an interview with Helen Mirren, then you’d know that in addition to being a world-class actress, she also has a wicked sense of humor. She has the twin traits of being both regal enough to play Queen Elizabeth II (The Queen) and versatile enough to play the proprietor of a Nevada…

So I just finished reading Peter Biskind’s biography about Warren Beatty, “Star,” and I found it as enjoyable as all of Biskind’s other books about Hollywood. He has a knack for finding people that are willing to speak their minds about subjects that are usually taboo and off-limits according to the modern-day PR machine. Even…

I mean, we all know that Elton John is a world-class singer/pianist and he’s crafted some of the greatest songs of all-time, but I’m curious to see if he’ll be able to entertain us when he’s not singing on SNL. My guess is that there will probably be a lot of skits revolving around John…

PDF downloads, for the duration of the 2017 awards season. (Make a note in comments if a link doesn’t load.) Battle of the Sexes, written by Simon Beaufoy Beauty and the Beast, screenplay by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos; based on 1991 animated film written by Linda Woolvert The Beguiled, Written by Sofia Coppola, based…

With you one 100%, James. There are not two sides to everything. When someone shits the bed I don’t want to hear from the people who sleep in shit. We have an ignorant unstable narcissistic fool driving our national bus. My kids are in that bus. Wake up, people. — Mangold (@mang0ld) December 16, 2017

“I think [technology has[ its made my life faster, it’s made the ability to succeed easier. But has that made my life better? Is it better now than it was in the eighties or seventies? I don’t think we are happier. Maybe because I’m 55, I really am asking these questions… I really want to do meaningful things! This is also the time that I really want to focus on directing. I think that I will act less and less. I’ve been doing it for 52 years. It’s a long time to do one thing and I feel like there are a lot of stories that I got out of my system that I don’t need to tell anymore. I don’t need to ever do The Accused again! That is never going to happen again! You hit these milestones as an actor, and then you say, ‘Now what? Now what do I have to say?'”
~ Jodie Foster

“If there’s one rule Hollywood has metaphysically proven in its century ofexperimentation, it’s that there’s no amount of money you can’t squander in the quest for hits.

“Netflix has spent the past couple years attempting to brute-force jailbreak this law. Its counter-theory has seemed to be, sure, a billion dollars doesn’t guarantee quality but how about three billion dollars? How about five billion dollars? Seven?

“This week’s latest cinematic opus to run across no-man’s-land into the machine-gun emplacements has been the Jared Leto yakuza movie ‘The Outsider.’ Once again, debuting on Netflix, another thing called a movie that at one glance doesn’t look like any kind of movie anyone has ever seen before, outside of off-prime time screenings at the AFM.

“If you’re working at a normal studio, you have one or two of these total misfires in a year and people start calling for your head. How many is Netflix going on? Fifteen? Twenty? This quarter? Any normal company would be getting murdered over results like that.”
~ Richard Rushfield